Virtual desktops provided as part of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or desktop-as-a-service (DAAS) offerings are becoming more commonplace in today's enterprise work environments. The security of having a remotely stored desktop, ability to access the desktop from any location and on any device, centralized desktop management, efficient use of hardware resources, as well as numerous other benefits made possible by VDI/DAAS are a large benefit for many organizations.
In a conventional VDI or DAAS environment, each user in an enterprise is provisioned a virtual desktop and is allowed to access his or her virtual desktop over a remote network connection, such as a WAN connection. The virtual desktops are typically hosted on servers that reside in a data center of the enterprise (or a third-party service provider), and each host server may execute multiple virtual desktops. Users can utilize a client device to remotely log into their individual virtual desktop and all of the application execution takes place on the remote host server that is linked to the local client device over a network using a remote display protocol, such as remote desktop protocol (RDP), PC-over-IP protocol (PCoIP), VMware Blast, virtual network computing (VNC) protocol, or the like. Using the remote desktop protocol, the user can interact with applications of the virtual desktop, which are running on the remote host server, with only the display, keyboard, and mouse information communicated with the local client device. A common implementation of this approach is to host multiple desktop operating system instances on separate virtual machines deployed on a server hardware platform running a hypervisor.
In some cases, when working on a remote virtual desktop, a user may wish to make some of the files and folders that reside on their client device accessible on the virtual desktop. For example, the user may wish to use the photo editing software application available on their virtual desktop to edit a photograph that is stored on their client device. In order to enable the photo editing application to access the photograph, the photo must first be made accessible to the virtual desktop. One way to do this could be for the user to upload the file to the remote desktop in some way, such as by emailing the file as an attachment and then saving the attachment from a mail client opened on the virtual desktop. This is of course time consuming and inconvenient to most users. There are numerous other methods of uploading the file, however most of these ways require some external software or tools to be utilized and typically involve inconvenient manual transferring of files back and forth between the desktop and the client device.
To address these inconveniences, some virtual desktop technologies offer a file and folder redirection feature which allows users to redirect local files and folders residing on their client device to the virtual desktop. Using this feature, a user may select a local folder (e.g. “C:/Documents”) on their client device, such as a laptop, and redirect it to the virtual desktop. The folder will be mounted to the virtual desktop and the user will be able to edit the files inside the folder using applications installed on the virtual desktop.
The redirection feature is useful to many users, however conventionally it only supports redirecting files and folders from local storage. Therefore, if a user is accessing their virtual desktop using a laptop client and wishes to share some files stored on a different device, such as their smartphone or tablet, the user would need to download and install the virtual desktop client application on each of those devices before the file could be redirected to the virtual desktop. This is usually too time consuming and inconvenient for most users and the difficulties are further compounded by the fact that most companies who provide virtual desktops also implement access control policies that prevent unregistered devices from accessing the virtual desktop infrastructure. As such, if the user has not registered their device, the user would not be able to take advantage of the file redirection feature. A more efficient way to share and access files on the virtual desktop is needed.